Virtual desktop environments provide significant business value by enabling companies to centralize management of the desktop experience and provide new ways for employees to access their information. This kind of system is composed of multiple interlocking technologies and, without proper planning, can be difficult to protect from common failure scenarios that are covered by traditional backup approaches in legacy desktop environments. End-user computing (EUC) provides many benefits to IT organizations, including reduced costs, centralized desktop management, increased workforce agility and mobility, and decreased data center footprints. As the total amount of data stored for virtual desktops that share common resources increases, traditional backup solutions have trouble meeting backup windows, putting data integrity and business continuity at risk.
New deduplication products such as the EMC Avamar® system provide the tools needed to protect virtual desktop environments from a wide range of failures by enabling the backup and recovery of the individual components of desktop infrastructure. Such virtual desktop environments have certain key components that need to be backed up in a way that maintains the critical relationships between them, and that facilitate efficient data restore operations in the virtual desktop space. One challenge with virtual desktops and virtual machines in general is that backups are not always straightforward since virtual machines are constructed dynamically or on-the-fly during runtime operations. Such virtual machines thus represent non-persistent sources with respect to customized data such as customizations of user settings or applications. After system restarts or user log off, such customizations are lost in non-persistent systems.
What is needed, therefore, is a method for protecting end-user computing (EUC) environments during backup operations in a way that facilitates efficient restore operations.
The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions. EMC, Data Domain, Data Domain Restorer, Data Domain Boost, and Avamar are trademarks of EMC Corporation; VMware Horizon View is a trademark of VMware Corporation.